Playing with SNOT

Continuing the exploration into interesting LEGO techniques, my son played around with SNOT. SNOT stands for Studs Not On Top – it is a way of building LEGO where the studs face in other directions, usually sideways.

One great example of this technique is the “SNOT ball” – this is a ball of LEGO where the studs face outward on all sides. It involves building 6 matching sides out of plates and then joining them together internally using various SNOT pieces. We followed an online guide for the first side, but my son picked it up really quickly and did the rest on his own:

To prove that is was indeed a ball, it had to be rolled (and captured in slow motion):

A pretty cool experiment that turned out to work really well! We need more SNOT pieces to build this kind of thing more frequently and on a larger scale (we didn’t actually have enough to maintain the structural integrity for long, and it fell apart on the next roll), so we’re definitely needing to expand our collection to include more versatile bricks.

Brick Bending

After watching a ton of LEGO Masters and being introduced to new ideas and ways of building LEGO, my kids were keen to try some new techniques. One thing we learnt about was brick bending – a way of layering bricks that allows them to create curved shapes by appearing to bend. You can see some incredible examples at brickbending.com.

My kids started with a basic example of the technique – using exclusively 2×1 bricks to create curved shapes. The size of the bricks allows them to pivot on the studs to give the illusion that they are actually bending out of shape. It’s honestly very cool, and they did this all on their own.

This wheel (which can roll and be comfortably squashed into an oval without breaking) uses 1,064 bricks in total:

This is just the start of these experiments and I hope to see more soon!